Help Difference between a battery pull and a shutdown?

[Deleted User]

I mentioned this in another thread but thought it might garner more attention here.

I keep seeing people indicate that this or that problem is fixed by a "battery pull." While I understand that a frozen/unresponsive phone must have its battery pulled in order to get it to reboot, I am failing to see what this accomplishes when your phone is functional.

Is there something that a battery pull does that shutting down your phone does not do? I was trying to work it out in my head and couldn't come up with anything. Memory is cleared when you power it down. Cache is stored on the flash card, so that doesn't go away. Nothing stays powered up during the shutdown...

So, help me out here. What does it do, that holding down the power button and selecting "Power Off" does not do?

 

[Zumi]

I'd guess that it's almost like clearing a CMOS on a PC - but I could be wrong.

 

[Deleted User]

Yeah, but the CMOS on a PC has a whole bunch of specific settings that are destroyed when you pull the battery out. That's not the case on this phone, since settings are stored in config files that are written to disk.

Otherwise, nobody would ever want to swap their battery because they'd lose settings every time.

 

[bigbadwulff]

Because it works?

 

[xliderider]

People who do battery pulls come from a Blackberry background, where it was a necessary evil.

Android is different. As you observed, most times a power cycle (Off/On) is all that is required to reset the device when it isn't acting quite right, but it is still responsive to the power button. The only time I had to pull the battery on my Android device was when a corrupted memory card was causing the phone to freeze and become unresponsive to all input (screen, softkeys, and power button).

 

[eraursls1984]

People who do battery pulls come from a Blackberry background, where it was a necessary evil.

I love not having to replace my case cause it wouldn't stay together after pulling the 5 times a day. Former BB Storm user here.

 

[xliderider]

I love not having to replace my case cause it wouldn't stay together after pulling the 5 times a day. Former BB Storm user here.

Should've used Quick Pull.

 

[mudads]

So there is no difference on Android if you just power off and restart or pull the battery?

I also come from a BB background so I am very used to doing a battery pull at least once a week to get that fresh start feeling. And I also did it to my Droid 1 about the same. But with the X I don't like doing it because the battery is difficult to get out and I don't want to damage the pull tab that helps to eject the battery.

So what's the verdict?

 

[xliderider]

Don't pull the battery unless you absolutely have to. Why risk damaging or loosening the battery terminals in the phone if you don't have to?

 

[Deleted User]

So... for a non-Blackberry user, what was the point in the battery pull for the Blackberry? Was there no shutdown function, or was it that the phones would stop responding?

 

[eraursls1984]

So... for a non-Blackberry user, what was the point in the battery pull for the Blackberry? Was there no shutdown function, or was it that the phones would stop responding?

I had a Storm which froze up a couple times a day but if you did a shutdown it wouldnt close out all the apps, they would still be running when you rebooted your phone. A battery pull would refresh everything.

 

[eraursls1984]

A BB shutdown is more like putting a pc to sleep than shutdown

 

[xliderider]

LOL. BB users have been trained with bad habits like battery pulls and obssessing about apps running in memory. With Android you don't have to do or worry about those things.

 

[queenrocks77]

With my curve it freezes up while loading pages and stuff. I've put the phone down and come back to it after 10 minutes and the little hour glass is still spinning. Phone completely locked up. The BB won't shut off if this is happening so you gotta pull the battery. Then wait and wait........ And wait.... Oh the Verizon logo!!! Won't be long now! Wait.... Wait....(I also like watching paint dry). I will not miss my crackberry. Upgrading the 25th! Too bad the DX will be a fossil by then.

 

[xliderider]

The DX is still a top notch Verizon phone. That's why it is still backordered. I'm sure the BOGO/BOGA promotions will only add to the backorder waiting time.

 

[SerialTurd]

A BB shutdown is more like putting a pc to sleep than shutdown

This. shutting down a bb is sleep mode. The phone will start up again in seconds when you do this. Pulling the battery really turns it off. The next time you start up a bb after doing a battery pull, you can run a marathon, come back and it will be just about ready to turn on.

 

[Deckoh]

i had a BB Storm for about a year and the only true way of getting your phone back to normal operating status was a battery pull. Quick pull app. worked well at times depending on what the issue at hand was. I'm not sure sure what happens when a battery pull is done, but it seems like it clears the RAM.

 

[bigbadwulff]

So far I've had to pull the battery more on this than I ever did on my Storm. But still that isn't much.
I used Quick Pull on the BB and rarely ever had to pull the battery.
Recently I had to pull the battery on the X because the Navigation kept shutting off every 5 minutes. A button on/off restart did not fix the issue but a battery pull did.

 

[SgtBaxter]

Is there something that a battery pull does that shutting down your phone does not do?

Seeing how Android is linux, and that it's never good to simply shut any linux or unix OS off, I'd say be careful. There are cache and other files open, and it's possible that simply pulling the battery will screw something up terribly. I'm not sure that android does, but many linux/unix systems defer writing changes to the disk. So, you may save a file, dump the system, and when you reboot you find out the file changes weren't actually saved. I've had this happen before in OS X when power failed.

While it's not extremely likely you'll really muck things up, it's always a real possibility. Shutdown closes all open files, and writes data in cache to the disk. So, *ALWAYS* shutdown instead of simply pulling the battery - unless of course the phone isn't responsive at all.

 

[bigbadwulff]

I always do a power on/off first before doing a battery pull with the Droid.

 

[Deleted User]

Shutdown closes all open files, and writes data in cache to the disk. So, *ALWAYS* shutdown instead of simply pulling the battery - unless of course the phone isn't responsive at all.

That's actually exactly why I brought it up. As a long-standing employee of the IT field, I have a natural inclination to avoid cutting power to anything before going through the proper shutdown procedure.

While phones will naturally need some protection against sudden power loss, since they are subject to much more volatile conditions than most computers, I would be surprised if there isn't some kind of impact when simply yanking your battery. It might only cause problems in very specific circumstances but I was trying to figure out what the gain was from it - if it was one of these things that's gotten prominence because "well, Steve told Bill who told Janice that a he heard from a Verizon employee that pulling the battery was the way to fix this issue..."

Sounds like Blackberry just doesn't include a good shutoff mechanism and this practice has come over mostly from ex-Blackberry users...

 

[Xman007]

I always do a power on/off first before doing a battery pull with the Droid.

i do the same. sometimes even the power switch is frozen, it won't work, so you have to pull out the battery.

I wonder what the iphone users do? i'm guessing their phones don't freeze up, being that hardware and software are both designed by apple.

 

[Deleted User]

I've had my iPhone freeze up many times (well, I guess that's relative: probably a dozen times, over a 2+ year time owning an iPhone - so not frequently, but many times), but the wake switch is wired like the power switch on most computers - it doesn't require the system software to be responsive in order to kill power to the device. Normally when you hold it down, it pops up a "Shutdown" slider and if you slide it, you'll get the standard shutdown sequence.

If you continue to hold it, though, the phone will just power off.

 

[DroidsIsPerfecked!!!]

People who do battery pulls come from a Blackberry background, where it was a necessary evil.

Android is different. As you observed, most times a power cycle (Off/On) is all that is required to reset the device when it isn't acting quite right, but it is still responsive to the power button. The only time I had to pull the battery on my Android device was when a corrupted memory card was causing the phone to freeze and become unresponsive to all input (screen, softkeys, and power button).

How is Android different, anyway?

It doesn't matter whether your phone is a Blackberry, an Android, or a razzberry, it has settings stored in two places - the software and the hardware. In any smart electronic device, the hardware is more or less directly connected to the battery, or the power cable. Just like your software, the cmos (hard-coded settings on your hardware) can sometimes be a bit buggy. Not all of the cmos settings are reset when the battery power is completely removed, but when pulling the battery consistently works, and nothing else does the job, then you know that something must have been reset when you did this. It works the same whenever my TimeWarner broadband modem hangs up, which happens at least twice a year.

That's really all I know, so don't ask me to explain more - I'm just reapeating what I've been told, and my experience says it adds up.

As for pulling a battery when you don't have to, I would never do that (especially when it's running) - always shut it down first when you can. The problem which I've been having is that my damned Inc becomes completely unresponsive, leaving the screen on bright and useless - this is where nothing short of a live battery pull (or a lot of time) will fix the problem! I sure wish somebody understood why this happens, and what could be done about it.

 

[decks19]

Everytime something happens to my phone it freezes and the power key doesnt respond. So my only option is to pull the battery. So far since ive had the phone i could say that ive pulled the battery about 15 times. And for those of you who might say well your phone is mest up, im just gonna wait and see if anything changes with the update.